FEATURES
Shaped by the Storm The 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina brings back memories for junior Corrinne Willems and her father who escaped the storm’s wrath, but not its effects.
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BY ABBY SMITH EDITORIAL EDITOR
hunder rolls through the air and shakes the rain-drenched earth while bolts of lightning regularly pierce the torrential rainfall in the otherwise dark sky. Small rivers form and rush down sides of streets as the draining systems struggle to keep up. Sitting in her room, she is caught in a flashback to her childhood and the storms that once threatened her life along with her father’s. She jerks herself back to reality and shoves headphones in her ears to try to drown out the noise and slow her pounding heart. For junior Corrinne Willems, thunderstorms create a sense of panic, reminding her of the hurricane that drove her from her home ten years ago this August. Just as it did for the thousands of other individuals living on the southern coast that year, Hurricane Katrina changed Willems’ life forever. According to livescience.com, Hurricane Katrina was one of the most destructive storms to ever hit the United States and by far the most costly with an estimated $108 billion in damage. The category-five storm caused almost 2,000 deaths and left over a million homeless along the Gulf Coast. While New Orleans is the most highly-publicized city affected, Katrina brought major damage to all of southeast Louisiana and southern Mississippi. Willems had been living with her father in Long Beach, Mississippi, for around a year when the storm struck their city. Their apartment was only a few minutes walk from the ocean. “I had basically nothing with me when I left Mississippi,” Willems said. To escape the hurricane, Willems traveled with a classmate to Tennessee where she was picked up by two aunts that she had never met before and taken to Kansas City. Even though the whole situation was rather abrupt and confusing for five-year-old Willems, she was used to adapting. Before Mississippi, Willems had lived in Texas and Louisiana and had originally been born in Kansas City. Willems was basically adopted into her aunt’s family for the next month and started attending a new school. Willem’s father, Don Willems, had stayed behind in Mississippi due to his involvement with civil defense and ongoing work at the airport. He survived Katrina’s massive storm but not without fearing his life. “Each time the winds picked up even more,
Hurricane Katrina destroyed homes, churches and roads alike in Long Beach, Mississippi, and nearby towns. The Willems’s apartment complex was a part of this devestation. (Photos submitted by Don Willems)
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LE JOURNAL October 2015
I feared I would never see my daughter again. I honestly thought [I was] going to die in that house that day,” Willem’s father said. Meanwhile in Kansas City, Willems didn’t know what to think. Because her birth mother had left her and her father earlier in her life, the permanence of her father’s kiss goodbye was unknown in her young mind. “At this point my biological mother was already gone, so in my five-year-old mind, I rationalized that my dad wasn’t coming back, just like my mom had never come back,” Willems said. Willems and her father were no stranger to storms, even before Hurricane Katrina. In the short time living in Mississippi, she and her father experienced the effects of Hurricane Ivan and several other tropical storms. The two had a close call with a tornado touchdown that same year as well. However none of these prepared them for the full-scale destruction Katrina would bring. Willem’s young age for all of these encounters saved her in a way. Only now looking back on it does she realize how scary it all was. “We were under mandatory evacuation on at least three occasions even before Katrina. We felt like we kind of became experts on hurricanes,” Willem’s father said. “It wasn’t true by the way. We were far from experts.” The chaos of her childhood has definitely played a part in who Willems is today. She has a knack for finding ways to adjust to almost any situation, good or bad. Her eagerness to talk and communicate with others at school is sharply contrasted with the quiet, creative side she shows at home, pursuing her passion of writing. Willems mostly writes works of fiction but enjoys proofreading other people’s stories as well. At times she reads up to 100,000 thousand words per day. “I love writing because I don’t have to think about it; it just comes naturally,” Willems said. The strong relationships formed with her aunt and father during the crazier years now serve as a reminder for what she went through and what she has been able to get out of it. “My dad and I are extremely close. It was just him and me for nine years,” Willems said. “I feel like with all the stuff we’ve gone through, we have to stick together because we are all that we’ve ever had.”
